the current state of play, the ongoing engagement with the surface, shown here in the sixth (current) state...
the lichens have landed (but are likely to populate still further)...there have been many, many states in this particular painting but i only have six full-on shots (some of the work is done in the horizontal)...
strangely, have not really referred to any particular photograph - perhaps this is wise; i do not want to end up with a botanical illustration...given that the above images do not adequately portray the finer workings of the surface - my primary concern - that of the layering process, of embedding a pictorial history of its making... i have taken these detailed images today, a made-to-measure, ground survey...
[the yellow tape measure is in cms]
[myriad colours from grey green, bisque to violet, prussian blue, a ruddish brown]
[splatterings of ochre yellow, mustard, showing the textural quality of the surface]no-one looks at paintings this closely, so not sure why i do - i suppose i like the painting within a painting...like something unearthed, buried deep within the layers, the rebirth of a painting within a painting - which leads nicely onto my next exhibition news (which, to make things a tad more organised around here, i will put into a new post)...
is my shoe art?
[new boots]is my shoe art? it is most certainly a design classic, with the tough, trademark yellow stitching and the air cushion soles, on which it reassuringly says 'made in england'... these boots are not just made for walking anywhere, they are built for the road... there is something so very uplifting to the spirit when one acquires a new pair of boots...
these dr martens airwair boots were a delightful, serendipitous find in a charity shop yesterday - brand new, never worn dm's in just my size (gasp!), in a beautiful pewter leather, my favourite (non) colour - and only £7!the bargain purchase (and subsequent formal analysis as evidenced in the above photographs) of some shiny new dm boots instantly recalled memories of charles thomson's (of the stuckists) appearance on bbc's newsnight, of the perennial debate that always surrounds the turner art prize, the is it art? and of the classic moment in the discussion, is my shoe art..?...charles thomson debating the merits (or not) of the turner prize 1999thomson need not have been so indignant; it spawned a new painting, one with more than a satirical nod to ex-friend tracey emin...
charles thomson, is my shoe art? oil on canvasbut, what about van gogh's still life of boots? a painting which i fondly remember first seeing whilst on a college field trip to amsterdam. i am sure charles thomson would agree that these shoes are art...
vincent van gogh, a pair of shoes, 1886but, what if one forgets for a moment that this is a van gogh painting - what then? the visual recording or transcription, using oil on canvas, of a pair of boots does not make it (yet) a notable work of art. however, these boots, looking very worn and placed as if they have just been taken off might reveal a back story - one of a hard day's labour or ongoing financial hardship - there is no money for new shoes. furthermore, if one imagines what might have been going through the mind of the maker of the painting (the artist), then the story unravels still further - the boots are perhaps now discarded, worthless, they signify poverty and perhaps misery in the mind of the artist. if these boots were van gogh's own then this painting is not just a still life, but a poignant self-portrait, one embued with the struggle of one man's existence......these thoughts led to a nostalgic trip down memory lane... to an old drawing of a boot that signifies my beginning as an fledgling artist...
pencil drawing of a monkey booti did this drawing of a monkey boot when i was about fifteen or sixteen years old. i remember well those monkey boots, they were in an ox-blood leather and i recall polishing them with a matching ox-blood boot polish. i remember too that it was a drawing study that i started at home (probably homework) and clearly (as was my bad habit then) i didn't complete it. looking at the drawing now, i am wondering why (or, in fact if) i did just draw the one boot and not actually draw the pair? the drawing, which is interestingly much larger than 'life size' has been cropped and stuck to an A2 sheet of paper with another drawing of a sheep's skull. i have deduced that the art teacher must have guillotined off the unfinished part of the drawing to make a more interesting worksheet for the exam portfolio - the exam work, as i recall, was sent off to the examination board in those days...these monkey boots remind me of my adolsecence, in the making of my identity, not as an artist but as an individual. every crease in the leather is a silent witness to my 'growing up' - of trying (and failing) to be different, pretending to be a rebel who really wanted to be accepted, of the self-consciousness and the wanting, the wanting-to-be an artist, but not knowing then what art really was...so, was my shoe art? back in those days i thought it was...
on found drawings and lost paintings
i went out for a little lichen reconnaissance yesterday; i had to remind myself just how diminutive these living, symbiotic organisms called lichens really are, having lost somewhat any sense of the true scale of the situation... but whilst there i discovered some particularly fascinating found drawings...
i shall try to explain why these are unlike the usual accidental, scrawled & scraped textures which may aesthetically be regarded as a found drawing (or a found painting, the matter of which may need further clarification in a future post), in the accepted meaning of physical marks visually recorded in response to something else, usually made on a surface...these are drawings made by ivy. one can clearly see the eroded traces of its prior existence, the pattern of growth, aerial roots in search of water and nutrients, the clamouring for light in every crooked twist and turn... the following four images were found in two different locations on the outside of a church and the drawings (as i perceived them to be) bore noticeable differences in their designs, which made me ponder...these first two images are close-up sections of the wall shown above. this roughly rendered facade faces east and is sheltered to the south by a brick wall and to the north by a dense boundary of trees. this very convoluted impression of the ivy's growth seems coded with some meaning, worthy of some visual analysis - wonderful whorls, contour lines, tight coils and concentric circles, a lasting (but not everlasting) imprint of nature at work...
one could easily make visual associations with topographical maps or satellite imagery of the earth, but i was also reminded of ancient inscriptions, lexicons, symbols or hieroglyphs... look unto these walls...this is another wall, from the same church; it faces due south...
here the ivy drawing seemed more fluid and calligraphic in nature, the lines stretched out more elegantly, creating a much slower, meandering path across the wall's surface, perhaps following the course of a hairline fissure in the render (or else it was one of its own making, such is the tenacity of ivy).
there must also be some relevancy, i thought at the time, to the differences in light and moisture in this south-facing location, when comparing these found drawings to the much busier drawings previously seen on the other wall... it was something to think about......a phrase that has been rattling around in my head recently is intellectual rigour... i thought that i had read it somewhere (or maybe i am just imagining it) but i actually heard it on radio 4 yesterday, serendipitously while transfering the photographs of the found drawings to my computer - so perhaps i am just 'tuned in' to it, wherever it occurs. whilst i think there is some conceptual grounding to the found art idea i do not think it has enough intellectual rigour...BUT, what if i were to create a situation where i grew stuff, such as ivy, or mould or whatever, and then either feed it or deny it light, water or nutrients, how this would control the pattern of growth and influence any resulting 'accidental' traces of their organic activity on a pre-defined surface, assuming this to be a way of forcing nature to make some art... any intellectual rigour suggests that one should be more academic and methodical and leave no hypothetical stone unturned (but what wonders i should find underneath real ones...). i did actually find a recipe for encouraging lichens to colonise on various surfaces but it would be quite a wait for any form of art to emerge from it...an artist that came to mind who intervenes with or uses nature as a means of making his own art is tim knowles. i first came across his work in a little show in the cut gallery a few years back. he is one of those more scientifically-minded artists, a little bit heath robinson, making complicated contraptions, devices or drawing machines, harnessing the powers of nature (natural phenomena such as the wind or light from the moon) to make 'his' art (is it a creative collaboration or is nature the real artist here?).
tim knowles, tree drawing (willow), 2006i realy like the concept of knowles' tree drawings and his website is well worth a look, but you don't get to see much detail of the finished drawings, more the machines that made them - this is an important part of the artist's practice, the systems or methods employed to create the work. another artist worth a mention in this context is the norfolk-based artist roger ackling, whose work i particularly admire, as it is very delicately crafted, often small in scale, combining found materials with a very intricate, controlled method of drawing using the power of sunlight...
roger ackling, voewood, sunlight on wood, 2008...so, here i am, re-creating in my spare time, but with quite unusual art materials (chalk, soot, metal powder, sand, dust or plain ol' dirt), the seemingly ephemeral traces of rust spots and encrusted striations, the pattern of lichens on stone or the subtle blooms of mould on a wall... i wonder what is lost or gained in the translation...a few years back i wrote in an email to an artist (who had first emailed me regarding my paintings) that i would like to leave my canvases out in the elements and let nature do its beautiful/ugly workings, let them go to rot, so to speak - the only problem being that rot is, in the end, rotting and rotten - there is no archival permanence to it, it makes things more fragile, fugitive, transitory, ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that...
detail of a lost painting, 2010what i wanted to do was to make permanent (for myself) these signs of impermanence as i experienced them, but simultaneously i wanted to be drawn into another world or landscape that i perceived just beyond the immediate surface, perhaps just a reflection of my altered state of mind at the time, and not just recreate the raw materiality of the object... i also wanted to conceal some of the made by human hands aspect of the process of creating a painting, to de-personalise it (again for myself, in order to rediscover or re-live the initial aesthetic experience) - thus, the use of various materials and methods to apply, layer, alter, blend, blur, cover up or reveal, slowly embedding a secret (and vital) history into the surface... as i wrote once before, it's colour applied; some of it lived and some of it died...
another detail of a lost painting, 2010i know that in the end the current lichen paintings will evolve to be something quite different from their initial source (the source being, by its very nature and location, separated from my own place of work) - formally synthesized, abstracted and distilled (a word that i probably overuse but it conveys the raw 'essence of seeing'), my own re-creations, that come to exist in themselves and won't knowingly have their contextual twins in the real environment...